Duplication in Prefixes and Suffixes of Biblcal Terms Tool

Question

A team I work with uses the ‘Prefixes and Suffixes’ list in the Biblical terms tool. In this language there is sometimes duplication of the last vowel of the radical before a\ suffix so I tried to follow the instructions in the

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help. It says an apersand (\&) can be used for duplication. However, when I put an apersand into the list of suffixes it caused near disaster. I got error messages and the text of the project disappeared and could no longer be found, even when I closed PT, rebooted the computer, reopened PT - the project was open but no text visible. Removing the \& from the suffix list resolved the problem. So either there’s a serious bug or I simply am misunderstanding the help file. Could someone give concrete examples of how to use the ampersand for duplication in the suffix list of the Biblical Terms tool?
For example, the language has a verb [samɛ]. Several suffixes can be added to the radical but sometimes it fimal [ɛ] is doubled before the suffix is added. How would they deal with that?
Thanks

Later… I’ve just compared the help file displaying here on the webpage with that inside PT and see there’s some sort of formatting error on the web version - it appears to say use \& but the version inside PT just has &. The backslash will be what caused the problem. Maybe someone can change that on the web version?

However, if seems that the Prefixes and Suffixes too can’t handle duplication of a single letter, just whole words. Is that correct?

Answer 1

I fixed the formatting of the help topic on the support site. The help on this site was generated from the Paratext 7 help and has formatting problems.

For a language with complicated prefix and/or suffix rules, it’s sometimes much better to just use Matching based on stems (Project > Project Properties and Settings > Associations > Match based on stems) - of course that only works if the project has done some work on the morphology of words.

Comments

Thanks. Yes, it would be nice to use the “Match based on stems” option but that really isn’t viable with this team. I will find a work-around - most likely putting both the simple radical and the one with doubled vowel in the actual equivalents.